Ashley Lebner is Associate Professor of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is currently completing a monograph, The Mystic of Friendship in Settler Amazonia, which explores the mystic relational dynamics that have animated the resettlement and politics of Southeast Amazonia since the late twentieth century. The book extends work that has appeared in venues including Current Anthropology (see especially the Reply: “Politics and the Mystic of Friendship”), Anthropological Theory, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the volume Redescribing Relations: Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and Politics, which she edited in honour of Marilyn Strathern and her interlocutors.

She has recently been awarded an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The research will document the reconsolidation of Brazil’s National Museum in the 19^th and 21^st centuries and will focus especially on the religious and secular knowledge practices that have shaped these two historical moments.